Giving things a fair shake

On the Tech scene, there is a new search engine out that has been billed as a Google killer. It’s name is pronounced “Cool”, but spelt “Cuil”. Welcome to the silly world of Web 2.0 nomenclature. Anyway, I have since tested this new search engine out and have found it sorely wanting. It will not even take them paying me to use that search engine to leave Google. They’ll have to pry Google from my “dead lifeless fingers“. lol. Google has improved so much as far as the things you can do with it. From the calculator function to searching via zipcodes to even job hunting, Google is invaluable to me and right now, Cuil is not it for me which is why I was surprised to see the Statcounter folks blog about how Cuil could be a serious competitor. They have since updated their post, but you just have to Google cuil to see how much it sucks. I can’t be bothered to put pictures of the frankly bizarre search results I’ve been getting. Still, it’s a new search service and it was founded by ex-Google employees. Hopefully, it’ll improve and I’ll test it out again.

Speaking of being a guinea pig, I’m also going to give DVD43 a trial. It’s a free DVD copy-protection circumvention tool and the reason I’m going to test it out is because DVD Shrink & DVD Decrypter are really slipping. That makes sense because development on those two products has really stagnated. Anyhow, I’ll get out some of my DVDs and test DVD43 out so I’ll update this post later. In the meantime, check out this video by Ely Rosenstock on how to escape the early termination fee (ETF) from terminating your cell phone contract. It’s useful, but I fear people are going to thoroughly abuse this now. I wish Ely Rosenstock had said how many more months he had left on his Verizon contract because that might constitute mitigating circumstances. I find it hard to believe that the customer service representatives et al would let someone who was, say, 3 months into their contract off the hook that easily. That said, I’m totally in favor of cell phone companies dropping their early termination fees and the first moves to end ETFs has already begun. Check out Google News and see thesearticles.